Overview
Client | Anonymous non-governmental organisation, Mpumalanga (12 staff) |
Industry | Non-profit, food supply and distribution |
Odoo version | Odoo 19 |
Hosting | Odoo.sh |
Modules | Inventory, Manufacturing, Purchase, Sales, Rental, Accounting |
Support | Ongoing, provided by XRA |
The problem: nobody could say where the buckets were
This non-profit gets food to communities across multiple sites. Its supplies go out in buckets, and those buckets are meant to come back.
On paper, that's simple. In practice, it meant tracking food stock, individual buckets and the movements between sites, with deliveries, returns and damaged items all in play at once. The tools they had couldn't keep up. A staff member who wanted to know what had been sent to a site, what had come back and what was still sitting in the store had to go and check.
The cost was time, mostly. Hours that should have gone into the work itself went into confirming where things were. And with stock records that depended on people remembering to update them, the risk of missing or inaccurate information was always there.
The organisation wasn't looking for a flashy system. It wanted one place where stock, serial numbers and movements lived, and where a record meant something.
What they asked for
The brief was clear:
Centralise inventory and distribution in one system
Track stock and serial numbers properly
See movements between sites as they happen
Get reporting they could trust
The approach: model the real process first
XRA's team started by learning how distribution actually works for this client, before touching the software. Then they built it into Odoo 19 on Odoo.sh in this order:
Products and locations, so every site exists in the system as a place stock can be.
Operation types that match how stock really moves.
Bills of Materials for the bucket kits.
The workflows that tie it together.
The more interesting part was the testing. Rather than sign off on a configuration and hope, the team walked the whole journey: receiving stock, manufacturing and packing, dispatching to sites, and processing returns, including damaged buckets. Along the way, the client's operations staff tested the workflows themselves. They supplied the requirements and validated the results, which meant the system was shaped by the people who'd be using it.
The project was led by a System Advisor, with technical review from a senior consultant and two members of the client's team handling operational and process testing.
The hard part: Rental, in a non-profit
What changed?
- Centralised inventory across sites
- Stock and serial-number tracking, including damaged and returned buckets
- Visibility of what's been delivered, returned and assigned to each location
- Better reporting